Re: [Asrg] Another criteria for "what is spam"...

On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 06:31:33PM -0400, mathew wrote

> Charging the recipient is never going to work.
> 
> Even assuming for the moment that we could magically solve the problem 
> of unsolicited e-mail, such that users would only get charged for stuff 
> they had actually asked for, there's an insurmountable problem: the 
> companies who want to do marketing on the Internet will never go for it.
> 
> Reason being, nobody (plus or minus a handful of people) will pay to 
> receive marketing messages. Which means that if your vision of 
> receiver-pays happened, e-mail based marketing would die a rapid death.

  Ana-one, ana-two, ana-three... awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.  In plain
English... too f###ing bad.

> Many non-marketing mailing lists would die rapidly too. How many 
> mailing lists that you subscribe to would you still subscribe to if you 
> had to pay by the message? Would you even subscribe to *this* mailing 
> list if every e-mail was costing you money?
> 
> Users don't like per-message or per-minute receiving fees on services 
> they pay for. Look at mobile phones--the US has lagged behind Europe in 
> mobile phone usage because users must pay by the minute to *receive* 
> calls.

  I subscribe to IStop.com.  At http://www.istop.com/residential.html
they list the basic monthly bandwidth quotas, and surcharges for any
additional bandwidth.  I used to subscribe to Sympatico.ca.  At
http://www.bell.sympatico.ca/mainNavigation.do?currentPath=highspeedPath
they, too, list the basic monthly bandwidth quotas, and surcharges for
any additional bandwidth.  Even Sympatico's modest 10 gig limit isn't
going to be strained by any reasonable amount of confirmed opt-in mailing
lists like this one.  I'm not into file-sharing.  The only time I break
2 gigs in a month is when I download the latest linux distro.  Given a 10
megabyte inbox at the ISP, I'd have to run a cron job draining it every
7 hours, day in day out, just to download one gigabyte of email per
month, assuming that the inbox filled up every 7 hours.  That would cost
me $3.00/month at IStop, assuming I was already at or above my basic
bandwidth quota.  I'd run out of time to read that much junk mail long
before I ran out of money to pay for it.

> How much junk mail would you agree to receive if you had to pay the 
> USPS for received mail? In fact, early on the postal system was 
> "recipient pays". That scheme fell apart in no time.

  I have a dirty secret for you... the end-user already pays.  It's just
not itemized in their bill.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
Email users are divided into two classes;
1) Those who have effective spam-blocking
2) Those who wish they did
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